Way It Goes

Being one of the all-time indie greats ain’t always doc martins and clove cigarettes ...

    I remember playing it in the room for the first time. I remember jumping for joy the first time we felt it under our fingers. It was a pain to end up where we did that day, so I also remember a look of exasperation on Jake’s face. I remember going to Sonic Ranch, a studio 20 miles from the border of Juarez, to start tracking the album. I remember feeling so disappointed by the way this song in specific sounded that I threatened to leave the session entirely (feigned shock all around). I remember showing Nathan the chords that I had been plucking for a while, and the melody he quickly conjured after familiarizing himself for just a moment. I remember hearing Jake try the slide solo, and how everyone in the room knew that nothing had to change. I remember showing a friend the transition from Sun Veins into Way it Goes for the first time and the look of delight on their face. I remember asking a confidant if they thought we had made something good. If we could keep the momentum we had alive. If they thought that maybe we could have another year away from home. They said they were worried we had made something that wouldn’t let us come back.

    Through our managers at the time, we had met a producer who had worked with some of our biggest musical influences. BJ Burton was a North Carolina transplant who ended up in Minneapolis by way of Bon Iver and Ryan Olson (Poliça). With great anticipation, we met with him for the first time at our vetting place for all new encounters, Bad Waitress. We were fast friends. Joking around, talking about what kinds of records we wanted to make. The marginal age gap gave us license to make geriatric jokes at his expense. Both parties were excited to work together. A rough blueprint of work flow followed. We would use a local studio to start tracking, then go to Sonic Ranch in the time that followed to complete the bulk of tracking.

    We started writing for the record in the winter of 2015-2016. Methodically, we clocked in every day intending to finish at least one song. Bring your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of riffs, for they will have a home in the meat grinder of relentless song searching. We wrote a lot of songs. Or rather, we had a lot of ideas. Many of them terrible. Unlistenable. But we remained steady. Something true of music, as with most other things, is that persistence is often the secret to success. Persistence through failure, through dissatisfaction, through embarrassment and shame, through confusing hours of unfruitful work. We were lucky enough to be able to treat music as a full-time job at this point. We were able to focus on it every day. And in between shows and tours, we would circle the wagons and convene around the ideas we had kindled thus far.

    Way it Goes came at some point in the middle of the process. A chord progression I had been playing within earshot of more capable hands. We put it through the crucible of playing it together in the room. Was there enough to mold and knead into something more? Quickly it’s a verse and a chorus. Jake is ad-libbing something that sounds nondescript and universal. It arrives fully realized. It unfurls itself in just a day and we know there is something special. A few months after we write it, we are at Sonic Ranch recording it. It’s the song we start the tracking with. Freshly twenty-something, it’s our first time treating the studio as a part of the creation process instead of a smash-and-grab of recording as many songs in as little time as possible. You can arrive at the studio with decisions left to be made. You can spend your time there experimenting instead of just collecting.

    As we record the parts of this song, I hear us approach and then speed past what I had expected it to sound like. I’m terrified that this producer we chose is going to adulterate the distilled thing we perfected in the room. It’s a reaction I don’t handle well. I don’t know how to sit there and listen to it get farther and farther from what we had written. I say I want to leave. Jake talks me down. Give it a day it’ll probably change again. In retrospect .. it’s probably very close to what you hear today, but it’s turbulence I don’t have the tolerance for. Throughout the mixing process.. I continue to make a stink. This isn’t the song I was in love with when we wrote it. I’m dragging my heels and offering very little, if any, constructive feedback. We’re on tour in Montana when we get a mix back. I remember listening in a hotel room and having the same feeling of playing it in the room for the first time. Whatever fears or misgivings I had about the song had vanished. Jake and BJ had eloped on some process of kneading the song, and it had worked.

    It was the beginning of a painful lesson for me. The ways in which change can rear its head into your life and show you there is still more to learn. We had diverging impulses on how to create things together, and that challenge thankfully made the work better. More rewarding, more enlightening. But it is still a lesson I have to reference frequently. How do we yield to each other in uncharted territory? How do you field your friend’s concerns about where you are together when you have maybe never felt more at home? Where does your allegiance lie between your heroes and your friends? I don’t know … but that’s just the way it goes 😎